As far as I am concerned the reputation of this Ben Wiser guy is so far down the toilet that there’s practically nothing he can do or say to recover it.
Both RupertBenWiser and yoavweiss reputations are fully gone from this. Pretty much the moment they closed an issue without a single comment [1], locked the repo from everyone else, and then a much later time claiming it was "spam" is a pretty dirty tactic [2].
Of course nothing happened to their reputations. Unfortunately there are very few people who care about this, or now who the people are in these proposals.
A reminder: the tech lead for AMP who promptly closed all discussions critical of AMP and AMP for email, and banned people who raised the questions repeatedly is now the CTO of Vercel.
Lol yep sure, almost every website out there uses Recaptcha, Cloudflare and similar services, but they all totally hate the guys who work on stuff like that.
The bubblethink here is out of control. A clear majority of website operators would love this tech to exist because the pile of hacks and user-hostile verification systems that currently keep bots and fraud at bay are time limited, and always have been.
I mean, is the yoavweiss in the wrong here? The #112 issue does look like spam (pretending to care about diversity in hope of making problems for the maintainer, because diversity issues are taken very seriously at Google).
Don't get me wrong, I hate this proposal too and I hope it gets dismantled and forgotten. But I would probably do the same, as an owner of a controversial repository that somehow got to the top of HN frontpage.
Like the old joke goes “you screw a goat once…”